Finding Home
by TGBMcCray
Summary: From a ranch in Oklahoma to the heart of Los Angeles, they move on but hang on. Love is a person, not a place, but geography sure can muck things up. Will a Christmas visit mean a second chance or the final goodbye to the only home she's ever known?
1. Chapter 1

**Christmas story, really a one-shot, told in parts. I didn't finish in time for the Mistletoe Contest, but I still want to post it. This is becoming a habit this time of year. **

The first moment of our last good bye started on the last day he cut hay. A field of gold glowed all around us and he smelled like sweat and the hay laying beneath our feet. It was cut down, clear to the quick, dry and dying. I was closing myself up inside, and that ring was worrying against my hand because it was a promise and promises are supposed to mean something deep and something true, like rivers that run in swirls to the sea, forever.

"Don't take it." I blinked, but "Don't take it," was what he said, and then, and he was choking, "Christ, girl. Don't go. You can't go."

Thing about it was there was a time when I would not have even considered it. It wasn't so long ago, a year, maybe two. Mama didn't want me for him. She never had since we were fourteen and he got off that horse at the end of Guvner Carl's lane, and announced he'd come to live with his uncle, the guv'ner. Of course Guv wasn't a governor no more, but he was old and retired and rich, and stupid, too, according to Mama, because nobody in his right mind would take in a farmed out cast off from his worthless brother over in Denver, no matter how good a hand he might prove to be.

He got off that tractor, that antique Farmall he liked to drive instead of the big shiny Deeres the Guv'ner favored, and he looked fourteen again though we were then ten years on from that first childhood day and four years on from promise rings of gold. It was so hot and I could smell the death in the air. It come on like that in late summer, because fall and harvest were coming, and after that, the snows.

I looked everywhere but at him, and all I could see was Guv's land that would be his soon. All I could smell was the hay and him, and my regrets because Mama always said you got trapped out here, on these thousands of acres, and they stowed you away like Peter the Pumpkin Eater. Soon enough all that's left is your shell and the rest has gone straight to hell.

"I got to." I didn't know where the words came from. I pulled them up from my boots to my lungs and breathed them into the air between us. It stifled. His hand was on his narrow hip and the other at his back and he was worrying a piece of hay between straight teeth because the braces he wore atop that fine white steed were long gone now. "You know what it means to me. I can get out of the library. I always wanted this."

He got his handkerchief and was rubbing his neck with it and it was unfair. Sometimes when I was very tired, he took that handkerchief and soaked it in hot water and lavender from Essie May's garden. He drew me a hot bath in his claw foot tub and laid me in it bare and he rubbed that lavender-scented rag from my collarbone to my belly button. When I was jam and butter, he crawled in with me and warmed me up from the inside with whispered words and roving fingers and the strike of his deepest self.

Damn it to hell. If I had not stopped, I might never have went.

"I want you." Petulance suited him. Love suited him. Sweat and hay and the rawness of the wind on his sunburned skin and the crinkles of his green eyes – any and all, it suited him. I had worn him like a shield and that day I feared I would break him and me.

"Come with me." I said it, but he was shaking his head already because we'd been round and round since the call and then the flight out for the interview. He accused Mama of conniving. He said she wouldn't be happy until I was on a jet and gone from him. It was an apprenticeship in an editor's office at a real publisher. She pulled every string she had left. I'd bought a new suit. He'd said he'd buy another ring, a diamond. Just, please. Don't go to California.

"I'm done with cities." There was finality in his voice and I knew it then, he told it true. Denver hadn't chased him away, he'd run. He'd run and hopped a horse and then a tractor and he had not looked back, not once excepting when I was riding behind him.

The tears fell without my permission but they had reason. "We're done," I said and I held to my stomach because I felt like retching. "You're done with me?"

He was on me like flies on sugar and he was kissing me, and somehow even then I would end up leaving him, leaving us. His mouth worked over me with the desperation of the beginning of our first end. "Never," Edward said. "I'll never be done with you, girl."

I wish I could believe him, still.


	2. Chapter 2

I was gone for her from the moment I saw her. She was twelve and not that tall yet, not like she would be by sixteen, so when I hopped down and got a good look at her, she would about fit under my arm. She had a big thick braid of almost black hair and I would learn too many years later that she wore it up all the time because she hated how the curls would take over in the heat and even the cold gray. I liked to let them take over, especially much later when she was up above me and that hair was all around us. I loved her slim neck but I loved her curls more because she was a naked angel up on top of me where she belonged and that wild hair was her halo and my damnation.

I wake up some days and I think she's near, just in the bathroom or out on the porch with Buck and Davey Don't at her feet, drinking her disgusting coffee in her ratty shawl. Knowing she's not, remembering that I cannot hold her, it's more than a punch to the gut. It's maybe my cross to bear and I am like Moses and not strong enough. I stand beside the bush but inside I quake with the fear of Him, for we have lost enough and I do not want life without her, too.

I need her back like I need the sun. She belongs with me. She keeps me warm. From her smart mouth to her moans when I am fucking her like she needs and I want, I am nothing now but work and memory. Broken memories. I do not know really why she's gone except maybe that it's the City of Angels, and of course they'd have to have the best.

I think I hate California almost as much as I hate her uppity mother.

Everything good God takes from me except Guv and our land. Maybe it's cause I keep hating and questioning, but hellfire we have been through enough this past year without her mama sticking her nose in, without her going off where I can't hold her and tell her I will love her no matter what happens. I keep trusting though because if I can't trust the big man, I might'n as well go off somewhere like Pickens did when he was old and had that bad front leg and just wait for it to end.

It's happy thoughts like this that are interrupted when a smartmouth says to me, like it's easy as plowing a field, "Go get her."

Emmett Everett the Third, only son of Guv's mechanic and my best friend, hands me another Coors Light and drops into the booth across from me.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you're drinking alone on a Thursday night. Hop a plane. You're depressing me and half the bar."

The bar, dark paneling and antique neon barely lighting up booths the same old green of school bus seats, is plumb empty. Well, excepting me and Emmett, and Rosie King, the bar keep and Em's promised. I take it back. Michael Harris and Nolan "Sutty" Sutherland, both old as dirt and about as smelly, are watching some shit football game in the corner. I don't care.

"She belongs here, Emmett. Stop giving me shit." We drink for a minute and I point at Rosie and raise my bottle. "You're a tattle tell, Blondie."

She pauses in her closing duties to flip me off. "Couldn't let you drink alone, darl'. 'Sides I need a ride home."

Emmett raises his bottle, too, and winks all exaggerated before turning back to me. He thumbs off his feed store ball cap and throws it on the table between us. "She could edit from anywhere. We got this thing called the interwebs these days. Why d'you think she really up and went?"

I can't tell him. I promised her I wouldn't tell nobody. I don't think her Mama even knew, because if she had she'd have hightailed it back from Dallas and refused to go back to Suburbia without her. Two dead babies in thirteen months wouldn't be a reason to circle the wagons for that bitch. They'd be a reason to take her away from me.

That's the part I can't get over. It's not bad enough losing two of what we made, is it? I know the doctor said it happens a lot. He said people have three, sometimes four before one catches, and the miscarriages are easiest if they're early like hers because there's no surgeries thata way. I close my eyes at night now and it's either her crying in that little room in Tulsa under a sheet and it's cold and I can't hold her like I want because she's half naked and there's a doctor and a nurse there both, or it's her in that field, that last day when she decided I wasn't enough to get her through. Either way, I don't sleep much lately.

"I don't know. Not for any good reason, that's for damned sure."

"Well, go after her then."

"What?"

"Are you a complete fool? Get on a goddamned plane. Nobody can stand you without her, not even yourself."

I can't go to California. We got wheat in the fields needs cut and soybeans that ain't going to harvest themselves, and that last hay will be dry enough to sell soon. She's got to come home. She's got to come back where I can put it right between us and not let Guv down either.

I pull out my billfold and lay some money down between us. "What I can't stand is you talking like a fool. I got work, man. Guv can't keep the crews in line this year."

He takes a big swallow of his beer and looks up at me as I get out of the booth. "You know your eye still twitches when you're hiding something? It's doing it right now."

"Oh, fuck off."

I'm walking out and he's still hollering at me because he's an idiot. "Rosie could book you a seat. I can take off a day or two to handle the crews!"

When I step out and head toward my truck, it's windier than when I went in. There's so much to do before first frost. I shouldn't be out when I got to be up so early.

She'll be back for Thanksgiving. She won't leave her daddy alone. She'll be back then and I'll make her see reason. I'll ask her to marry me right like I should've done before Guv got sick. I'll make her see she's the sun around here and the moon, too. She's the only reason to look up at all.


	3. Chapter 3

**So very many thanks to the FicSisters for recommending this little story. Their banner story is perfect for it, and their site, International House of Fic, is well worth your time to check out.**

Alice Brandon-Hale wore four-inch heels to work every day though she was gone three months with child when I met her. She towered over me when she brought back her edits of my edits. The apologies she made for her bitchiness were not sincere and so I did not pretend to accept them. She said she quit smoking when she got pregnant and also was without wine, a double damning that left her to profanities and chewing out her bumpkin assistant.

"Do you think you ought to work on the way you speak?" The question came one day after a thirty-minute tirade over the way I had edited some elevator text on a book jacket had barely petered out. "I don't know how I feel about it. I suppose it's charmingly colloquial but to everyone who doesn't know you, you just sound stupid." Her hair was down to her waist by fall and she wore it in waves like a Victoria's Secret model. She had a habit of flipping it over her shoulder when she was pissed off or annoyed or whenever she talked at me, really. I would've worried about it, but I had other things on my mind, I reckon.

There were days then, as the calendar pages changed but LA stayed sunny and perfect, that I wondered if Mama had known about the babies with Edward. Sunshine day after day with endless hours with a pregnant city wench felt like the kind of hell she would've raised had she knowed about it all. I'd done had about what I could take and possible firing or not, I said so.

"I didn't ask how you felt about it. The way I speak is the way I speak. It don't affect my work, so I don't see as how it's none of your daggone business. Ma'am."

When I looked up over my computer screen, Mrs. Brandon-Hale was smiling. She was quite fetching when she smiled and that was disconcerting, because it felt wrong to find someone so seemingly unkind attractive in any way.

"Well," she said, lifting her tiny body with her growing bump off the table in my cubicle, "You're either exceedingly stupid or brilliantly rash. I shall endeavor not to fire you until I can decide."

* * *

By late November, we had reached an understanding. She was staying sick well into her second trimester. I brought her herbs for her tea and ointment for her stretching stomach made from fresh things I found at the Santa Monica farmer's market. I don't know why I did it, except that she was good at her work and fair with mine. I was improving under her hawk's eye. Truth told, I felt bad for her. Pregnancy did not suit her. The dark circles under her eyes were crow's shadows that no amount of fancy makeup could cover. And yet she wanted her baby so much. She was forty-one and well past the time when most women might conceive. I guess I saw myself in her desperation. Edward said no woman who fought to be a mama could be bad inside. It ain't in them to be evil if they want to protect an unborn baby. I never had knew him to be wrong except when he'd said we were bound for parenthood ourselves. I guessed no one was right all the time.

She reminded me to close the blinds in my office and power down my computer one evening as I wrestled with an author biography that read like a bishuary notice. "We're closed the rest of the week for Thanksgiving. I assume you're flying home?"

"Of course."

"Well…" She was hovering around the short wall by my table, her fist in her back near her sciatic nerve. "Have a good flight. I hope security isn't a bitch."

It was concern and I took it at face value and smiled as genuinely as I could. "You just gotta know how to talk to them. Colloquial charm and all."

She laughed. "Right. Let me know when you start bottling that."

* * *

I didn't go home for Thanksgiving. I couldn't face him. I couldn't walk down the aisle at evening church with Daddy and see him over there with Guv and Essie May and pretend that my life was rolling on without us. Life endured despite my best efforts to build a concrete wall of work that would finally make all the noise in my head stop. I functioned –work, long walk, repeat, and retreat to madness every night. Every second of every hour I breathed with my empty womb eroding my sanity and a sucking hole in my heart where he and those two babies tugged at me, crushing me with what could have been, what should have been, what I might have done, and worst of all, what might never be.

The grief and the second-guessing weighed on me. I had signed up to serve meals to the homeless at a local non-denominational church. Plenty of people had it worse than me. Ladling up gravy and canned cranberry through a ten-hour shift helped me put my troubles and my blessings in perspective but it was still tough to start the walk home.

I was wrestling with myself, fighting my way out of the bottom of a pond in cowboy boots with tow straps at my wrists. Every step felt like a reminder that somewhere, many miles away, was a life I had run from.

The California sun was setting in a blaze of red and orange when I rounded the corner and caught sight of a tall man in a cowboy hat leaning against the outside of my complex. He has a duffle bag next to him. Alejandro, the super, pointed up at him, telling him loitering was prohibited and unless the tenant he was there for would be home soon, he would need to wait someplace else.

"He's here for me, Alex," I said.

"Yes," Edward said, taking off his hat so his hair glowed like a fire in the sunset. "Yes, Bella, I am."

Glory be, it felt good to hear him say it. I daresay I hoped at just the sight of him. That was probably my first mistake.


	4. Chapter 4

She asks me first about Guv and Essie May. I got nothing particularly good to say here but I try to make it sound okay because I have gotten on a flight and took a cab with a foreigner who laughed at my hat. I didn't kill him but I am on edge and it is noisy here. Every sound jars and it makes me angry because I can barely hear her voice. She's quiet as a mouse and I don't want her quiet. I want her to be angry, be happy, be my life, just be my girl again.

I tell her they are doing as well as can be expected. Guv got a walker, finally. "The cuss don't want to use it, but that cane was worthless anymore. It's for the best."

She takes my things upstairs but I stand against the building and fish for a smoke because her eyes are wet. She asks me to wait so I do. Alejandro eyes me and he says, sort of protective-like, "You the one, big man? You hurt her?"

"I didn't," I say, but I'm mad. He's five foot seven and nobody. He don't know her. Nobody out here does, not like I do. He's smoking some kind of stinky cigarillo and looking up at me like he wishes he had a matador's sword to run me clear through. "Fine," I say, flicking ashes. "I know. But I just wanted her to stay."

"She didn't, heh? And here you are."

"We won't bother you long. I come to get her."

The sun, though low, it hangs out there so much bigger even than at home. It feels like a movie set out here, sort of unreal.

Alex shakes his head and looks up, way up, at me. "Hope you can feel your brain up there, bendejo. Start thinking with that."

I'm getting really fucking sick of being cursed at in my own damned country and I might say so, but Bella comes out in yoga pants with a pair of pink tennis shoes on.

"How bout a walk?" She's looking down. I hate it. I want to see her eyes. I want to wrap her up and run her home, back where things make sense, but she reminds me of a new colt, skittish and kind of wobbly. I take her elbow to keep from taking her mouth, and she leans into me so we hit the sidewalk. I can smell Mexican food and salt water, but mostly I smell the perfume she just put on to cover up the gravy and mashed potatoes. In the long slump of her shoulders and the way she lolls against my arm, I can feel it. She's bone tired but if she wants to walk, we'll walk.

If she gets too tired, I'll carry her.

* * *

We get colors back home, but not like this. Blues that are blue and green and gray and purple all at the same time. Red and oranges the color of kids' play-doh. Everywhere I look, it's excess and bright and too damned much, but she's an anchor I just want to hold on to. She's a new color, too, darker than before but still pale. Her hair's got red in it and I wonder if that's from this sun or if she done something to it.

We walk down this big boardwalk to the shore. There's a Ferris wheel and a fair number of beggars. She shakes her head but I stop with my billfold. There a lot of them close together here but I pass out dollars until I'm out of ones and then we move on. They call behind us, "Thank you. Cowboy, huh? Thank you, cowboy."

I can't be this close to her and not so I reach down and grip her hand. That blue out there is burning now with the sunset. I think I may go up in flames too. "I know you needed time but I didn't know what to do when you didn't come home for Thanksgiving." I'm trying to tell her, and she's done closing her eyes and sighing at me.

"Don't."

Well, how can I not? She's right up there with the Redeemer and she's so close to me, her fingers in mine, Alpha and Omega, my beginning and my end. Lord, God, but she may end me yet.

"What then?" My voice is shaking and that makes me mad because I sound fourteen instead of my own age, and damn her anyway for telling me what's what all the time. "I lost the babies, too, you know. You don't got the market cornered on grief, Bella."

She stops, and the colors are behind her and on her skin, almost swallowing her. I've still got her hand but it feels colder, even though nothing here ever really gets cold.

"I know it." She says, and then she cough chokes. "I destroy everything. I mess up all the time."

I don't know how long we stand there after she reaches for me. I think maybe it's twenty minutes but maybe it's two hours. The sun is gone and it's dark, or it should be if it weren't for all the lights round here, by the time we walk back wordless. Inside her two room apartment, she hands me one of my own t-shirts shirts to change into because mine is soaked with the salt of her tears. Davy Pissed, a calico cat with a bad attitude, has urinated in the general area of my bag, so a t-shirt that smells like her laundry soap seems a good choice. She says he's been marking his territory since he come home from the LA shelter with her two month back. I hate this cat. I hate that he's a tie here for her, a nail in a door that makes it harder to reopen.

I want to just reach for her, but it's too wide a gulf. She finds a _Gone With the Wind_ marathon on AMC, and we eat store bought pecan pie out of paper plates with Reddi Wip while Katie Scarlett throws a vase at a wall. Before Atlanta is burning, Bella has shoved the cat off her lap and is laying across her dumpy blue couch with her feet in my lap. She's so tired. I don't know if she's ever looked so tired, even after baby two's heartbeat vanished at eight weeks, bringing her to her knees with cramps and bleeding out back of Guv's biggest pole barn. She looks like that now, with the deep bruising shadows under her eyes, trying to hold herself together now like then so we could go in for Essie May's Easter buffet like everything was normal.

I don't know if she's asleep first or if I am but sleep we do, as together as we have been in so long.

* * *

The movie has restarted when I wake to her lips at my throat. The scent of turkey still hangs in her hair, and it reminds me of where we'd be at home now. I want her home so much. I want to give her entries in a family Bible of our own, with no ending year written after the birth date on the lines. Our lives feel like that sometimes, at least mine does, like it's stuck on the dash, unfinished, on hold.

Her fingers are cold still and shaking like leaves, so I tuck them into my fist, and kiss her back. Her tongue slips against me, biting at my lips, licking my jaw. I want to be gentle, but she doesn't want that. She pulls at me through my jeans, bites my neck.

"Bella," I say, trying to warn her. "Not like this. Let me love on you."

She rocks back on the couch, the balls of her feet under her ass. She's naked except for her shirt, and her bra is in the floor with her pants, a shapeless pink blur in the glow of famine and soldiers on the TV. "No," she says, hair escaping from its plait. She almost seems angry. "Take me. Mean it."

I do mean it. I'm pulling her back with my hand wrapped in her hair. Every kiss is brutal, and I hope I'm not making it, making her, worse, but she moans and drifts, opening up for me like a morning glory to a new dew. My fist closes around one breast and I suckle the other, hard, trying to pull the bud of tight nipple down my throat. At once she comes to life, pushing me back, wrenching at my jeans, and she's on her knees on the worn carpet, sucking me down, hollowing me out as her mouth latches on with the venom of a snake that won't let go. She bites and I claw at her throat. I want to shake her but instead I hold her at the shoulders and fuck her little mouth, push and buck till she's nearly gagging, and then her eyes open, deep bruises beneath changing them from brown to black in the orange flicker of the TV. I let go of her, just for a second, unsure.

She lays down in the floor, and I fall on her, grabbing her ass, pushing the fingers of my other hand up into her, one and two and three, and she's squirming, biting my chest, licking my nipples, and heaving up against me as I push and push and thrust into her with my hand, wishing it was me, wishing I could take her, lay waste to her and build us new from the ashes. The shivers seem to come from inside her belly, fanning across her body like the ripples on a pond, if the pond were fed from a volcano. In a minute, she'll blow. I have brought her here and home so many times before, and I know.

The heat of her eyes come back to me, and she pulls at my hand, urging me over her. "No." She grabs me by the dick. "No, I want you. Give me you."

Everything is wrong and yet it's right. She wants to be possessed and I want to hold her down and make her stay, and so I do, pushing her flat beside the coffee table and driving my cock into her hard, one thrust to home, and pulling it out almost to the end, before ramming her again. I drive into her, wanting her to know, wanting her to feel me tonight and tomorrow and always know that no one possesses her, no one reaches her the way I do. She reaches up to me, leaning up on her elbows to thrash against me and bite at the veins in my neck, while her heels come around my ass and pull me into her. "Harder," she says. "Deeper."

"Shut up," I say, and it's a growl. "You're trying to make me mad. I know what to do."

"No." Her heels rock against my ass. "Hard. Fuck me. Please." Her hands come around and pull me even as I bottom out inside of her, and my thoughts seem to bleed away between my ears. I drive like a rack and pinion, grinding deep into my other half, willing her to feel me, to know me, to love me. I reach for her throat and pull at her hip, too, twisting and slick, deep and hard, and on and on and on until the shivers travel between us and I can feel her tightening against my cock, her body sucking at me, pulling me deepest inside even as she goes to pieces in my arms.

I put my head against her forehead and go with her.

* * *

I get up to pee around three in the morning. She's wrapped in a quilt on the couch, hair in her face, and going into her room to find the bathroom without waking her is difficult but I manage it. I feel around inside my bag when I come back for the airline ticket I brought with me, the one for her, and I prop it up on the bar that runs across a half wall between the living room and the postage stamp of a kitchen. There's a letter, too, in a plain white envelope. I don't know if I said the right things. I tried to tell her, to let her know that I love her, that I need her so, so much.

It's my boom box in the driveway, my grand gesture. It's all I've got.

* * *

I wake up in the floor by the couch stiff legged with a crick in my neck. Davy Pissed eyes me warily from beside a half dying lemon tree on the kitchen counter. I call for her, but she doesn't answer. Her shoes are gone.

On the counter, the ticket has been removed from the envelope but it's stacked neatly on top of my unopened letter. Beside it, she's written carefully on a purple post it, in clear, precise script.

"Please go. I won't be back until you're gone."

There's no love, no postscript at all. She hasn't even signed it.

My beginning. And my end.


End file.
